Relief Maps: a tool for understanding intersectional experiences of place

Social structures condition the everyday experience of urban space for different social groups. People differently positioned in relation to gender, race, social class, age or sexual orientation, among others, encounter limitations and restrictions in their use and access to the diverse spaces of the city. Studying the uneven and unequal experiences of the city helps identify social groups that are vulnerable in different urban spaces. It also reveals groups that are privileged and spaces that are seen as shelters or safe spaces for different people.

About the Relief Maps tool

Relief Maps are a tool to collect and visualise data on the emotional dimension of inequalities in order to show how places are differently experienced depending on one's social positions. Through showing the 'reliefs' of comfort and discomfort, they reveal lines of inequality, shedding light on often neglected forms of discrimination that configure urban life.

Relief Maps provide an innovative tool for research and intervention that connects three dimensions: the social (social structures), the psychological (emotions) and the geographical (physical spaces). Its name highlights two meanings: ‘relief’ as distinctiveness due to being accentuated, which would be the hills, the curves that rise up and show the places of oppression, the places where one has a strong experience of fear or discrimination. And ‘relief’ as alleviation or removal of pain or distress, which would refer to the valleys, to those places where oppressive experiences decline and that culminate with places of relief. The concept of 'relief' shows the dynamism and mobility between places and experiences according to the different structures that intersect.

Example of a Relief Map drawn by young Muslim women

Relief Maps has been developed as a free access digital tool where one can create a project and share it with participants to complete based on their own experiences. A Relief Map is generated in response to answers from participants related to their feelings and experiences in different places and based on their self-identification of the social categories to which they belong. In the example above, the social structures chosen by the participant were gender, age, religious identity, ethnicity and social class. And the places were secondary school, street, social networks and family home. The Relief Map visually demonstrates the reliefs of inequality and discrimination by showing, in a grade of comfort (downwards) to discomfort (upward), the subjective perception of discrimination in different places by each axis. In this sense, Relief Maps are a way of studying intersectionality, as they show the relation between different axis of discrimination and how they may affect people’s everyday lives in a variety of ways.

Relief Maps are a tool for analysing and visualising intersectional data as well as a tool for the conceptualisation of intersectionality in itself that brings to light connections between the systematic production of power and the production of space. The tool represents, in a visual and simplified way, the complexity of intersectional relations and show the 'reliefs' of both oppression and privilege alike. Distancing themselves from essentialist categorisation, the tool allows power structures and identity categories to be conceived in a non-rigid and non-stable way, placing the focus on the material repercussions of inequality. When place is considered as central, the analysis is situated in a specific context, avoiding universalisation of experience.

Currently, the tool allows for the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data, which enables further analysis of the lived experience of discrimination. The quantitative data, the grade of (dis)comfort for each place/axis, can be compared between different social groups, allowing for analysis of, for example, who feels afraid in what kind of places and by what cause. The qualitative data, the comments written for every dot and the emotions linked to them, provide nuanced information that may contribute to the identification of the causes of such fear or how it is configured.

Your Ground map, developed by Monash University XYX Lab and CrowdSpot, invites people to mark unsafe and safe spots around Australia. This demonstrates another technique for capturing the lived experience of place.

Understanding urban inequality and the application of Relief Maps

The Relief Maps tool was developed during my doctoral research on feminist geographies. When studying youth access to public urban space in a medium-sized Catalan town, Manresa, I found that young women felt afraid in public spaces because of their gender. For young women who were also lesbians, their fear was of suffering homophobic aggression, which greatly affected their access to public space. Generally, young men in this study did not feel afraid in public space, although gay men shared the lesbians’ perception of vulnerability. For those that lived in neighbourhoods far from the city centre, the trip back home was also perceived as more dangerous. The diversity of experience among young people was a key finding, as were emotional factors, as restrictions to access were not physical or direct (as in the case of explicit prohibitions or fines), but conditioned by feelings of fear, anxiety or exclusion. Understanding the complexity and variability of experience of place based on one's gender, sexual identity or social class, is enabled through analysis of the relationship between geography and emotion.

In relation to urban dynamics, several studies have used the Relief Maps to study how cities are lived and perceived by different social groups. In my own research, I have examined young lesbians’ experiences of public space from an intersectional perspective [2]. And recently, the Relief Maps have also been used for the study of women and mobility, narratives of cyclo-activists, LGTBI discriminations in a city and student’s experiences in university campuses.

Of special interest for urban studies is the App (Situa) that is currently being developed following the works of Mei Po Kwan [3] and her defense of feminist cartographies and the importance of geoinformation tools for social transformation. With this innovation, and through the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide, spatial analysis will be undertaken to map who suffers what kind of discriminations in which specific places in Barcelona city.

Using Relief Maps in urban policy and practice

Relief Maps allow a large variety of applications to differentiated contexts and spheres of study, as well as opening the door to possible developments both theoretical and methodological alike. It is a flexible tool applicable to any social context, making the possibilities for modification and adaptation endless. Different places, typologies and parameters of lived experience can be used and measured, whether a large area or an individual street, to understand areas where greater control, vulnerability, authority or stress are experienced by users.

The Relief Maps tool can also contribute to raising consciousness about how the city is experienced by different people. For users, completing the form and thinking about how one feels in the different places of their everyday lives, helps render visible some experience that may pass unnoticed or discriminations that have been normalised. In this sense, Relief Maps also have a potential for intervention, especially if they are used in collective spaces where an individuals' Relief Map can be compared and discussed with other people.

The subtleties of experience are important and tools such as Relief Maps or Situa help us to understand the relationship between identity and place. We need to understand this intersectional experience of place if we are going to create cities that are safe and free from discrimination.

Maria Rodó-Zárate

Maria is a Serra Húnter Fellow at the University of Barcelona. She holds a PhD in Geography and her research focuses on the study of social inequalities from an intersectional, spatial and emotional perspective applied to issues such as the right to the city, gender-based violence or LGBTI-phobia.